Packer

Packer (http://packer.io) is an open source tool for creating machine images.

We use Packer to create VirtualBox images and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), which are then distributed as Vagrant Boxes on Vagrant Cloud.

This has been modified from the original to

• use apt for managing the installed version of Mesos and Docker
• use upstart instead of runit to manage Mesos and Docker daemons
• remove Logstash dependencies
• produce Vagrant boxes using Atlas.

Installation

Instructions here: http://www.packer.io/docs/installation.html

Usage

To build an AMI or VirtualBox image, make sure your keys are set or you've configured the AWS Command Line Tools:

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="<your_access_key>"
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="<your_secret_key>"

Then, run packer build <template>:

$ packer build -var ami_prefix=<mycompany> ubuntu-14.04-mesos.json

To only build the VirtualBox image:

$ packer build --only=virtualbox-iso ubuntu-14.04-mesos.json

To only build the AMI:

$ packer build --only=amazon-ebs ubuntu-14.04-mesos.json

Build times are typically 5-15 minutes plus another 10-20 minutes to replicate to other regions. You should see streamed output like this:

$ packer build -var ami_prefix=mbabineau ubuntu-14.04-mesos.json
amazon-ebs output will be in this color.

==> amazon-ebs: Inspecting the source AMI...
==> amazon-ebs: Creating temporary keypair: packer 55304cd7-343f-cbe0-7d08-3875e6dcf1d6
==> amazon-ebs: Creating temporary security group for this instance...
==> amazon-ebs: Authorizing SSH access on the temporary security group...
==> amazon-ebs: Launching a source AWS instance...
    amazon-ebs: Instance ID: i-0ad312c1
==> amazon-ebs: Waiting for instance (i-0ad312c1) to become ready...
==> amazon-ebs: Waiting for SSH to become available...
==> amazon-ebs: Connected to SSH!
==> amazon-ebs: Uploading include/ => /tmp/
==> amazon-ebs: Provisioning with shell script: /var/folders/01/8gq4dvp57bs9hlyh0dxpkr140000gn/T/packer-shell373313770
    amazon-ebs: Ign http://security.ubuntu.com trusty-security InRelease
    amazon-ebs: Get:1 http://security.ubuntu.com trusty-security Release.gpg [933 B]
[... REMOVED FOR BREVITY ...]
==> amazon-ebs: Adding tags to AMI (ami-f26ca9f2)...
    amazon-ebs: Adding tag: "os:distribution": "Ubuntu"
    amazon-ebs: Adding tag: "os:release": "14.04 LTS"
    amazon-ebs: Adding tag: "mesos:version": "0.21.1"
==> amazon-ebs: Terminating the source AWS instance...
==> amazon-ebs: Deleting temporary security group...
==> amazon-ebs: Deleting temporary keypair...
Build 'amazon-ebs' finished.

==> Builds finished. The artifacts of successful builds are:
--> amazon-ebs: AMIs were created:

ap-northeast-1: ami-f26ca9f2
ap-southeast-1: ami-50467b02
ap-southeast-2: ami-79542943
eu-west-1: ami-99fc9cee
sa-east-1: ami-3944c124
us-east-1: ami-0a878262
us-west-1: ami-494eac0d
us-west-2: ami-734a7f43

Credit

This is almost entirely based on Mike Babineau's cloudformation-mesos and used Nathan Sullivan's packer ubuntu to get up and running with the VirtualBox builds.

License

Available under an MIT-style License see LICENSE for details